Skip to main contentLast week the news was filled with images of police Chief Mark Kroeker, who supposedly could be Los Angeles' next chief of police.
Don't bet on it.
On paper, Kroeker looks like a logical choice for L.A. Mayor Jim Hahn, who's decided it's time for a new chief. Kroeker spent 32 years working his way up the LAPD ladder, narrowly losing out on the top job twice before settling for Portland in 1999. As everyone who knows Kroeker will attest, he'd jump at the chance to be chief in L.A.
Hahn is unlikely to do anything to dissuade Kroeker from applying. Some of Kroeker's biggest boosters in L.A. are Hahn backers, notably the L.A. police union and Bert Boeckmann, a millionaire conservative-Christian car dealer Hahn appointed to the Police Commission last year.
But if past is prologue, Kroeker will never get the top job.
Gay and lesbian activists in L.A. spiked his previous bid for the job, in 1997, when Richard Riordan, a Republican, was mayor. And that was before Kroeker's infamous tapes surfaced during his first year in Portland.
In the late 1980s, in tape-recorded speeches to church groups, the then-deputy chief called homosexuality a "perversion," said wives should be submissive, and described disciplining disobedient kids with a sawed-off boat oar.
The flap has long since blown over in Portland, but the gay community in L.A. has been trying to get copies of the tapes. Some political observers say Hahn would be crazy to choose a chief with such political baggage.
But there may soon be a different chief's job in L.A. Next month an obscure agency in Los Angeles will decide whether to approve putting a measure on the November ballot that would result in the San Fernando Valley seceding from Los Angeles. Leading the secession drive is Kroeker's friend Boeckmann, who along with his wife has been described as "the first family of the San Fernando Valley."
If the vote goes Boeckmann's way, the new city of 1.3 million will very likely want its own police department, and former LAPD Assistant Chief David Dotson says Kroeker would be a "shoo-in" for the top job.
WWeek 2015